Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

George Stevens | The More the Merrier

full steam ahead!

by Douglas Messerli

Robert
Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, and Lewis R. Foster (screenplay, based
on a story by Robert Russell and Frank Ross), Garson Kanin (uncredited
contributor), George Stevens (director) The
More the Merrier / 1943

The preposterous “hero” of George Stevens’
slightly offbeat wartime comedy, The More
the Merrier, is Benjamin Dingle (played by the noted character comedian
Charles Coborn), a figure who believes—like Captain Farragut of Civil War
History that life should be lived by “damning the torpedoes” and moving “full
steam ahead” —steams through this comedy at such a terrifying trajectory that
he almost succeeds at putting all the other characters under water. Fortunately, the other two leading characters,
Constance Milligan (the incomparable Jean Arthur) and Joe Carter (the affable
and laid-back matinee idol of this period, Joel McCrea) are good swimmers, standing
up to his bullying tactics with surprisingly strong tactics of survival.

Arriving
in the war time capitol of the USA as an advisor on the housing shortage two
days early, Dingle finds his hotel suite unavailable, the following discussion,
typical of his bullying tactics, following:

Hotel Clerk: [looks over
Dingle’s reservation] Senator Noonan engaged

a suite beginning the 24th.
Why, this is only the 22nd. You’re two days

early.

Dingle: Anything wrong with
being two days early?

Hotel Clerk: Why, no, sir.

Dingle: Everybody ought to be
two days early. When this nation gets two

days early we’ll be
getting somewhere.

Hotel Clerk: Yes sir. But
unfortunately this suite won’t be vacated until day-

after tomorrow.

Dingle: Can you connect me
with Senator Noonan?

Hotel Clerk: The Senator’s
out of town.

Dingle: Oh. When will he be
back?

Hotel Clerk: Well, he was due
back, uh, day-before-yesterday, but he’s,

he’s, uh….

Dingle: Two days late.

Hotel Clerk: Yes, sir.

Dingle: Well when Senator
Noonan gets back late, tell him I was here

early.

The early-late motif is played out for all of
its possibilities throughout the film, as the metaphor is extended not only to
time schedules but personal relationships.

What can such a determined speedster do but to find a newspaper add
offering an apartment room, and claim it for himself against a mob of other
good intentioned prospectors? A single woman, Constance Milligan, has decided
to sacrifice her two bedroom apartment by sharing it, but before she can even
become involved in the rental decision, Dingle has sent all the others home and
declared himself, despite her protests that she is determined to have a woman
tenant, her new roommate.

Constance Milligan: …I’ve made up my mind to rent to nobody but a

woman.

Dingle: So, let me ask you
something. Would I ever want to wear your

stockings?

Constance: No.

Dingle: Well, all right.
Would I ever want to borrow your girdle, or your

red and yellow
dancing slippers?

Constance: Of course not.

Dingle: Well, any woman, no
matter who, would insist upon borrowing

that dress you got
on right now. You know why? Because it’s so

pretty.

Constance: I made it myself.

Dingle: And how would you
like it if she spilled a cocktail all over it…at

a party you couldn’t
go with her to because she had borrowed it to

to it…in?

Before the poor Miss Milligan can even answer,
he’s flipped a coin and won. He’s in.

But she, in turn, presents him with an impossible time schedule for
their bathroom and kitchen use in the morning, an instant by instant
determination of everything from their awakening to their bathroom habits and
their eating patterns—an impossibly intricate interweaving of two individuals
that is doomed to failure, and which punishes poor Dingle by leaving outside
the apartment door in his pajamas.

In part to retaliate, but also just out
of his impetuous personality, he leases his half of the room to Sergeant Joe
Carter (Joel McCrea) who has no place to stay as he waits to be shipped
overseas. Obviously, the action leads to even greater friction between Dingle
and Milligan, and, ultimately, when he reads her diary she has accidently left
out in a rain storm, ends in his ouster. But, just as any perceptive viewer
might have guessed, it also leads to romance between Miss Milligan and Carter.

The only difficulty
between these two from their former tenant is that they are not nearly as eager
and determined to act. Milligan is engaged to a high-paid bureaucrat, Charles
J. Pendergast (Richard Gaines), who even by his name we know is not suitable
for her breathy, down-to-earth sensuality. And when Dingle is forced to deal
with Pendergast at a luncheon he dislikes him the moment he sees him, again interceding,
perceiving that Joe would be a far better match.

When
Joe is arrested, due to the good boy intercession of a teenage neighbor, for
being a Japanese spy, Miss Milligan is forced to testify in Carter’s behalf,
but a reporter haunts the couple and they, to avoid scandal, are forced to
marry (through Dingle’s nefarious suggestion)—temporarily—with plans for an
annulment. Returning to the apartment, however, the two discuss their
predicament through the separating walls, before coming to realize that they
truly love one another. So does Dingle, the retired millionaire, speed on,
having swept away of another couple of unsuspecting passersby, who are now
quite capable of swimming on their own. “Full steam ahead!”

If
this comedy is not quite as hilarious as it wishes itself to be, and if its
predictability sometimes interferes with the screwball antics it would like to
emulate, Stevens’ film still provides a great deal of pleasure, mostly due to
Jean Arthur’s comic acting performed with a voice pitched between improvident
prudence and a petulant purring that is nearly impossible to resist. Despite
the bland appeal of McCrea, he is just handsome enough that we desire him to
fall into the abyss that any “dingle” (the word meaning a small, deep,
concealed dell) might have lured the two into. Finally, the communal manner of
living the movie espouses is perhaps the closest American cinema ever got to a
concept of social(ist) or group love before the late 1960s, as the intrusive
camera moves, like another household guest, winds in and out of walls and
windows, assuring the apartment's tenants little privacy. But then Washington,
D.C., in this topsy-turvy wartime world, is somewhat like living in a vast
dormitory. Men and women encamp at night in hallways. And a simple visit to a
night club leads Joe Carter, in this male-depleted society, to have to fend off
an entire room of swooning women. Marriage is clearly the only thing two people
can do without others.